1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to aircraft networking. More particularly, the invention relates to an internet protocol (IP) networking architecture and method for structuring IP addresses, within an aircraft that simplifies routing and enhances security.
2. Discussion
In the aviation industry, the development of aircraft technologies has commonly centered around enhancing safety, reducing costs and improving the services available to onboard passengers. With regard to passenger services, the primary focus of most technologies has been communication and entertainment options available to passengers. In particular, passenger services such as media servers (e.g., movie delivery), on-board telephones and seat terminals have all evolved in recent years.
With the increasing popularity of the Internet, certain shortcomings associated with conventional seat terminals have become apparent. For example, the traditional seat terminal has a processor and a seat back display mounted in each seat, and the passengers do not have the option of supplying their own devices. With the widespread popularity of laptops, palm-held computers, etc., it is easy to understand that such a limitation is significant. This is particularly true considering the desirability of accessing the Internet from these devices. In fact, it is well known that conventional seat terminals lack the ability to provide off-board communications to the passenger altogether (with the exception of telephone service).
Another concern associated with providing Internet access to passengers is aircraft security. For example, it is critical that passengers not be able to access certain command and control interfaces within the aircraft while at the time being able to send and receive IP packets to interfaces throughout the world. It is also important to note that devices out on the network must be similarly blocked from accessing these confidential interfaces. The consequences of failing to adequately isolate command and control interfaces are dire. It should be noted that achieving such a level of security is particularly difficult considering the fact that certain crew interfaces might also desire access to the Internet.
An additional concern relates to IP routing. Specifically, the routing tables used by ground routers contain route entries for destination IP addresses in order to accurately route packages to their final destinations on the aircraft. It will be appreciated, therefore, that requiring a route entry for each seat of each aircraft on the network would result in prohibitively large routing tables on the ground. The same concerns are true for the airborne router located on the aircraft. In fact, it is easy to envision an airborne router routing table having on the order of five hundred route entries for the various interfaces disposed throughout the aircraft. It is therefore desirable to provide an IP networking architecture that enables the use of passenger-supplied computing devices, blocks passenger access to command and control interfaces, and simplifies routing tables.